As his star rises, stage magician/ventriloquist Corky Withers (Anthony Hopkins) is offered a series of specials by a major television network, but network policy demands that he submit to a medical exam. Adamant in his refusal to be evaluated, Corky flees to where he grew up in the Catskills, and he encounters Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), whom he had a crush on during high school. She's stuck in a loveless marriage, and she and Corky become lovers while her husband is away on a business trip. It all looks rosy, but Corky's facade of normalcy periodically cracks, revealing a twitchy, short-tempered, and frighteningly volatile side, and as he slides headlong into outright unstable territory, he regularly engages in conversations with his creepily aggressive dummy, Fats, with the back and forth between them being a clear marker of his escalating insanity. When his agent (Burgess Meredith) tracks Corky to the Catskills and witnesses one of the ventriloquist's meltdowns with the dummy, he realizes Corky's reluctance to undergo the network's medical exam was due to fear over his mental state being discovered. The agent makes it clear that Corky is not mentally sound and offers to get him help, but the influence of Corky's Fats persona prompts Corky to murder the agent, and from there things only get worse when Peggy's jealous husband, Duke (Ed Lauter), returns from his business trip. Corky — as Fats — stabs Duke to death while Peggy is away in town, and he resolves to run away with Peggy to Paris, but Fats doesn't want to be left alone, so he threatens to tell everything...
I clearly remember TV ads for MAGIC when I was in 8th Grade, and I wanted to see it, thanks to the "Is the ventriloquist crazy, or is his dummy actually alive and homicidal" trope being a tried and true scary gut punch since at least as far back as DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), and it's an aspect of horror that many kids my age were first exposed to via reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, specifically the episodes "The Dummy" and "Caesar and Me." Ventriloquist dummies in general are visually unnerving, and when deployed in a horror context, they can be downright terrifying. That's what I was hoping to get with MAGIC, but while it was well-made and packed with solid performances, I found it to be quite a tepid affair that wishes it were as hair-raising as "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" segment of DEAD OF NIGHT. Admittedly, that one's a high bar, but I was hoping that a film nearly 35 years after that British classic would bring some shattering scares in a far more permissive era of cinema. Not bad by any means, but nothing I will revisit.
Poster for the theatrical release.
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